A dirt track leads through scrub grass, rubble, and weeds. To my right, a few dilapidated industrial buildings lie unoccupied. To my left, mounds of overgrown foliage overshadow the path; beyond them runs a line of track that used to shuttle trains to Sligo and Maynooth.
This is wasteland by most people's definition, although Kaethe Burt-O'Dea, a healthcare design consultant and "urban ecologist", sees things differently. Burt-O'Dea last year received a Guinness Projects Award to help plan the conversion of this deserted train line from Broombridge in Cabra to Broadstone Station into a green sanctuary and cultural landmark.
She points to a large pile of concrete rubble. “Those are the remains of the platform,” she says. “They’ve thrown it around, but that was the stop for the steam train. It ran this line until the 1960s.”
This scrubland will mark the terminus for the new Luas Cross City extension traversing the city centre. That development, approved in 2012, has been seen as a long-overdue boost for the economy of the northside. Official announcements herald it as "an opportunity for substantial development and rejuvenation of an important inner-city urban quarter".
It is also the site for the Lifeline, Burt-O'Dea's reclamation project, which aims to rejuvenate this "urban quarter" in rather different ways. It is still in the early planning stage, and to access the site we have had to sneak through a gap in the railings.
This has long been a troubled spot, particularly the unmonitored Broombridge train station nearby, which is notorious for anti-social behaviour. Part of the remit of the Lifeline is to involve local communities, a task that might prove tricky, given local scepticism of terms such as “urban ecology”.
Burt-O’Dea talks passionately about the projects she has in mind – allotments, roof-top apiaries – low-level, open-access projects that people can get involved in if they wish, and that she hopes will change the neighbourhood little by little.
Uncherished overgrowth
The Lifeline will be delivered in tandem with the installation of the Luas along the disused Midland Great Western Railway between Broadstone Station and Broombridge.
Since 1961, the only glimpse most Dubliners have had of this line has been from one of the three road bridges overhead, from which you can look down on to a dense mass of uncherished overgrowth, scattered with old couches, electrical items and plastic bags.
But walking the line opens up a different perspective. Too often these derelict sites are overlooked as wastelands, suitable only for development or “regeneration”. Burt-O’Dea thinks otherwise. For her, this is a rare site of natural biodiversity in the city that is worth cultivating. She says there could be 10 years’ work in it, but seems to relish the challenge, believing this kind of economy is what makes a city work.
For her, the Lifeline is all about waste. The modern urban environment is inexorably wasteful. Beyond the day-to-day waste we generate ourselves, there is a sea of wasted resources and wasted human potential. Burt-O’Dea takes a robust, practical approach to urban waste. Like the railway builders before her, she is a pragmatist at heart who would like to see neglected resources put to use.
The Lifeline will generate cottage industries, producing soap out of waste oil from chippers and restaurants. It will establish apiaries in the north-west inner city where people will be able to train as beekeepers and to bottle local honey, pollinated along the Lifeline and the nearby Botanic Gardens. In fact, bees’ working patterns – the commonage, the hive, the freedom from boundaries – will provide a model for the project as a whole, a way of thinking about the connections between productivity and urban communities.
Burt-O’Dea has already begun to produce a range of soaps and foot soaks for sale, using waste materials from companies such as the Real Olive Co in Stoneybatter, to demonstrate the kinds of activities and products that can be expected from the Lifeline. Most importantly, she believes the project will be thoroughly sustainable.
What becomes clear, as we talk, is that the Lifeline is about much more than this single strip of land. It is a symbolic struggle: a contest over how we view, and use, our city.
She encounters a particular mentality when she talks to development agencies, she tells me.
“If I want to build a bridge, say, there’s a process. We bring in agencies, we apply to Europe, we fly in [Spanish architect Santiago] Calatrava. It’s on that scale. It’s just so removed. And I’m thinking, couldn’t we stage a competition, get designs for temporary pontoon bridges made out of, I don’t know, plastic bottles?’
She's exaggerating, but she has a point. The Grangegorman Urban Quarter website demonstrates the kind of sanitised, overdesigned environment envisioned for the area. Burt-O'Dea is not interested in these pristine, privatised spaces. For her, a genuine public space in the city requires hands-on involvement and a readiness to react.
It’s not enough to just wade in with a series of prescriptions. You have to engage with the realities of the city and be prepared for them to shift.
“Just look at this train line,” she says. “They built a whole strip of canal to service it, and it was only operational for 30 years. You have to be ready for change. That’s the mistake, planning for permanence. You’ve got to always be reacting.”
Constant change
For Burt-O’Dea, as for the railway builders, this is what cities are about: constant change. A city isn’t a problem to be solved, she says, it’s something that will always be evolving. This ethos, I suggest, might place her at odds with the interests of centralised urban planning.
“That’s true. This is absolutely not the top-down agency approach. I don’t believe in that kind of prescriptive approach. But of course, without planning, there’s the danger it’ll end in chaos.”
She pauses. “It’s striking the balance. That’s the challenge.”
That challenge will underpin the whole project. We are effectively trespassing on the site. The Guinness grant is one thing, but a project of this magnitude will require more. Where will it come from?
Are the Railway Procurement Agency, for instance, really going to give more than lip service to the Lifeline? It's easy to be sceptical. This kind of close-focused enthusiasm will hardly be enough to challenge the heavily financed forces of urban development.
Yet there is something contagious about Burt-O’Dea’s conviction. Her eye for detail informs a much broader vision, of a sort of Eden in northside Dublin. And standing on the overgrown line, under the Liam Whelan Bridge, it feels not only possible, but valuable, necessary and brave.
